Category: opinions

For years now, Christopher Columbus has elicited a wide spectrum of opinions. For some, he was a ruthless man who was responsible for thousands of deaths and marked the beginning of a ruthless regime over people who were deemed inferior by self-righteous Europeans. For others, Columbus was a symbol of the beginning of a New World and crucial to the development of Western Civilization, kick-starting the beginning of the New World, capital N, capital W. Recent study and re-assessment of events has turned this idea on its head, however. Upon reading two drastically different articles, it was clear why agreement over Columbus’ legacy is so divided. One must dissect why exactly two such contrasting opinions exist to understand whether Columbus truly was a historical icon, or mass murderer.Continue reading “Christopher Columbus: Hero or Villain?”→

If I were to contemplate the whole of the universe at once, I would probably go mad with the very universality of it. The matter is, everyone considers their surroundings at one point in their lives, from their infancy stretching to the urn they are so graciously put in. I think a good metaphor for this phenomenon would be the barre at ballet class. Music tunes, strings plucked, muscles relaxed. Plié, plié, plié. And even though this is a pretty standard procedure, humans, professional and the whole alike, have an amazing capacity of completely fucking it up. And the funny thing here is, any mistake can be made to be graceful if you can pull it off right. Anything is a dance if you call it so. And the universe is just like that.

Us as humans like to apply a sort of rigidity to everything, a structure if you will. But doing so, you are taking away from the complexity, the messiness, the chaos which makes the thing so inherently beautiful. Ballet was made to satisfy this structure, but even this structure falls apart occasionally, if not most of the time. And we make it look good. Sometimes it makes us bloom with new ideas, when a faltering misstep is perceived to be this avant-vogue move towards something even more structured, less imperfect. Imperfection defines perfection, and vice versa.

Universality has no structure, no application. Universality is not a generalized thing. Universality is a chaotic creature – it aches to break out of those rigid lines and falter as it will. And it does. It does so when we’re not looking. And the aftermath, the debris left over, that’s what we find and call discovery. And I think that’s our pitfall. We call this debris progress, but what’s the point if we learn a lesson from something that’s already come to pass? Because in doing so, we’re not learning how it came to pass at all in the first place. It’s too complex for our silly, rigid little minds. We need to be like nebulae, and implode. We need to destroy ourselves to reinvent ourselves and become something even more beautiful again.

Chaos is our friend. The universe is not our pet, but it’s not our master either. The universe shares a familial bond with us. We are of the universe, after all. And thus, the universe and the chaos that makes it up is a part of us too. That creature abides in between our ribcage, and it beats, beats, beats, trying to count us into the ring, to perform an avant-vogue ballet piece. Beat, beat, beat. Plié, plié, plié.

So do it. Beat, beat, beat the cycle, break the rules, and dance to the beat with majesto.

The thing about hypocrisy is that no one, not a single person in this world, is exempt from it. Everyone is a hypocrite. This has been established already, by much smarter individuals than I.

But you know what else human beings are? Pretentious.

It’s natural. When someone gets excited about something that you knew about and gushed over ages ago, the superiority complex immediately settles in and you can’t help adopting a cool, just a little dismissive tone as you say “yeah… I know. I knew about them/that/those/whatever like… three years ago.”

Especially today with the neo-hippies who call themselves “hipsters” traipsing all around the place, it’s even easier to assume this holier-than-thou attitude, because being mainstream is just embarrassing now. To be mainstream is to be basic, and who likes being called basic? I don’t imagine a lot of people do.

The thing is, now that hipster culture has become so prevalent, even being hipsteris mainstream. To be a true hipster you have to come out on top as a hipster hipster. I mean, what sort of garbage title is that? Continue reading “Hypocrites and High Horses”→

Opinions are so damn complicated. We’re human, right? I think so. Whether you believe humanity is just an abstract concept or not is up to you, really. It’s not for me to decide what you have to think.

What do I think of opinions? You’d think, at this point, I have some kind of riff with it, but I really don’t. In fact, I bloody love opinions. Opinions are the best. Opinions are what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. It’s what makes us… human. Again, whether you believe in that humanity stuff is up to you.

My problem isn’t opinions, no. My problem is people with opinions, or to put it more eloquently, people with opinions who just don’t shut up.

Everyone, every single person in this room, has felt fear. It is a debilitating state of being, which can grab you from the back at any given time. We have evolved into a machines, which spit out products obviously born of terror. Why else do we put bright attention signs on wet floors, carry pepper spray for the late night route, or hang fire extinguishers in every room, in every building? Why would we, as a species of masterminds, be influenced so heavily by something as trivial as fear? Continue reading “A Speech on Fear”→

I’m tired. I’m tired of hiding who I am behind incoherent words of poetry. I am tired of people only ever appreciating a paragraph of true, heartwrenching emotions if it comes in a pretty, dainty, sugarcoated package of conveniently placed adjectives.

I did it again. It’s been engrained into my fingers because I’ve taught myself that people will only listen if what I have to say is pretty and unharsh to the ears, or otherwise it is lost in space. Bluntness is under-appreciated and therefore scorned as a boring essay.

Well I say, screw it.

I could write a paragraph about the intricate eccentricities of my puny, unimportant life. In fact, I did. I actually just wrote a couple paragraphs of unabashed truth about myself. I was the freaking gospel.

But I erased it. Cause the pure, blunt honesty of it all made me uncomfortable.

Then again, maybe that’s the reason why we like to write pretty words, why we can’t escape it. We are hiding behind the sheer lace curtain of poetry.